TETSUYA WAKUDA
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again in a kitchen. Washing dishes. It was a start.
And a little later on, when a chef named Tony
Bilson needed a sushi chef for his restaurant,
Kinselas, Tets stepped up. In return, Bilson
taught him to cook.
"I started by doing some Japanese food ...
and then he gave me the chance to do other
things and he basically told me to trust my
instincts and to try mixtures."
The kitchen at Kinselas was set up like a
Japanese kitchen, "with a lot of Japanese knives,"
and Tets began to feel more confident there, not
least due to Bilson's encouragement. He had the
opportunity to test a lot of his 'mixtures.' But he
was also learning that first of all cooking about
technique, about precision and attention to
detail. "Then you bring it to the next level; you
work on taste and textures."
Tets worked. And learned. Then he moved
on. Six months here, a year there, working with
others from whom he could learn. He helped
start a few places: Roses, Kytes, Ultimo's, which
he could have taken over "but the rent was very
high and the position not so good ... and then
this place came available." A tiny shopfront in
suburban Rozelle that he called simply Tetsuya's.
And tiny it truly was (the downstairs dining
room sat around 20) but from little things big
things can grow.
ROZELLE
By then Tets had married. Which was lucky,
because that meant he had someone to help
him in the kitchen, and as the kitchen was just
about big enough for two it worked out fine.
His wife, whom he taught, did cold larder and
presentation. The restaurant sat 44 people, and
the menu was four courses. Between them Tets
and his wife served nearly 200 dishes every day.
He didn't pre-cook anything, and he changed
the menu every three to four weeks. Cooking
was his life.
But Tets did not cook for himself---he
cooked for his customers. Having a restaurant is
"about making people feel comfortable, about
recognising your customers, and remembering
what they like," he says. And what they liked
was Tets' food. As one critic noted, his dishes,
"conjured up in a kitchen roughly the size of
the passenger section of a stretch limo, are
subtle, elegant, exquisitely balanced and in no
way designed to draw attention to their creator."
Yet they could not help but do so. Though
there has been much talk of 'fusion,' of 'Pacific-
Rim cuisine,' these were not the dishes that Tets
presented. His 'mixtures' were a combination
of the Japanese tastes of his homeland and the
French technique he had learned from Bilson,
always exquisitely presented and guided by an
extraordinarily sure hand.
Or mouth. Because for Tets, there is only
one real secret to cooking. You must like to eat.
"If you eat, you taste, so you know." He pats his
stomach. "You have to be a good eater."
But simply being 'a good eater' does not
account for Tets' success. His luck in finding
himself in a country which boasted no great
culinary history cannot be underestimated.
Few places other than Australia, he believes,
would have allowed his cuisine to develop in
the way it has. In Australia, he says quite simply,
has has been free to do as he will.
This is due in part to the wave of
immigration that followed World War II.
Europeans, particularly Greeks and Italians,
arrived in the tens of thousands. Asians, too, and
those from the Middle East found homes from
home in Australian cities, and their influence
permeated the culture, and the food. In a way,
Australian cuisine was but a blank slate, to be
written on in a dozen languages or more.
"Australia is a young country ... we don't
have centuries of food history," he says. "Each
cuisine has certain things you can do, you
cannot do. And we don't have that."
GROWING
Because no one told Tets what he couldn't do,
he just went on and did it. His passion was all-
consuming. He had little in the way of family life.
He had only Tetsuya's, his customers, and his staff.
Which kept on growing. Though Tets'
success had been virtually instantaneous, it was
nearly four years before he was able to expand
Previous spread: Australian
chef Testuya Wakuda
photographed, with fish,
for a magazine feature
in 2003.
Opposite: Tetsuya in
the kitchen of his Sydney
restaurant, Tetsuya's,
which opened in 1989
and is regularly named
among the world's best.